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Got a giant package of Prairie in the mail about a month ago, and their Bomb! was so impressive that I’ve almost been scared to try any more of it. You got to have an excuse to be so decadent, and since I spend 80% of my life wearing unwashed sweat pants I can’t justify feeling so fancy.

So let’s go with a beer held only in middling esteem, in spite of its exquisite packaging: Pirate Noir (which is French for “Grey Homosexual.”)

Noir is an imperial stout brewed by Prairie for the express purpose of aging it in different types of barrels. This makes sense for the kind of people who claim to be able to taste the difference between barrel varieties. I am not one of those people. Dudes, for example, will tell you that pappy Dark Lord is way different from the regular bourbon aged Dark Lord, but it’s totally not, they’re lying.

I mean, yeah, I can taste the difference between weird gross barrels and BBA stuff. There is no excuse for aging a stout in a tequila barrel, for example. Rum barrels? Eh… I hate to admit it, but I can taste the difference. It’s not bad, but it’s overwhelming, and the noir base is really timid for an RIS. So up front you got a big dose of Bicardi burn and then you get this watery-seeming, mildly hoppy and mildly vinious impy. The Noir might not actually be watery and mild, but it’s just not strong enough to stand up to the giant rum burst.

Louisville is depressing. The skyline is limp—much worse than Indianapolis, even. About on a par with Grand Rapids, or Cedar Rapids. Actually, post-flood Cedar Rapids is a good comparison, only if Cedar Rapidians bombed abortion clinics for sport and were still pissed off about having to share water fountains with black people.

Do I sound angry? Sorry. The south makes me nervous. Which is why I get almost giddy whenever I hear of some small ray of goodness emanating from its miasma, like maybe if I go experience something nice and pure there then the next time I hear someone speaking in that awful accent it won’t feel like maggots burrowing into my spine.

Enter Against the Grain, Kentucky’s buzziest brewery. I’ve had a few of their beers in Indy and they’ve ranged for solid to very good. And—take notes, kids—they have the good sense to directly distribute their kegs. Meaning they are generating hype in Indy and Cincy and even Chicago, which is very good for their brand.

Their set up was adorable. Way new brewery-y, with lots of exposed ductwork and warm track lighting, but it makes sense seeing how the brewery is physically is a part of a fucking AAA ballpark. I drove past the place 3 times before I realized the “BREWERY” written on one of the park’s enclaves wasn’t some Captain Morgan’s Cove-type bullshit. So, even without attending a game, I guess it’s safe to assume that the Louisville Bats have maybe the best beer selection of any baseball team in the states? That’s not fair.

The place is long, wide, and nicely ventilated. 5 15-barrel tanks sit well illuminated above the dining area, and bearded men paced about them intently. The crowd was southern mixed race-—meaning the black people came in diverse forms, but the white people were all fuzzy and car-shaped. The TVs showed sports and the music was innocuous.

I can’t gauge the south. The little aesthestic tics that signal coolness up north here can be meaningless. My first time in Louisville I came across a heavily tattooed youngster with gauged earlobes. He knew where the weed was, of course, but he also very deeply hated gay people and damn, he said, if we wanted to get out of this economic mess we was gonna have to stop spending so goddamn much on foreign aid. You know how much that takes outta his tax dollars? Too goddamn much. Then he said some slurs.

Anyhow, this place had some legit vegetarian options. Overall it was friendly, but I can’t tell if it was for-real friendly or that weird, perfunctory southern friendliness that’s actually just a thin patina they pull down to mask their pressing hatred of outsiders. It also looked like it could get real busy real quick, but it might be in the kind of area and appeal to the kind of people where it ain’t likely to get too awful busy at any given point.

Annnnd onto the beers:

Citra Ass Down

7.6%, served in a tall tapered 12 oz glass. Smelled like citra. Tastes like PsuedoSue only with some pronounced ethanol on the very back end and a surprisingly nice cereal nodes lingering behind on the aftertaste. The front’s all megacontemporary, then, and the back is like I’m drinking a pre-prohibition all malt. The two sides match up surprisingly well.

Maybe it’s because a severe stomach ailment has prevented me from drinking any beer for several days, but this just really hit the spot. Medium-acid citrus hops against aggressive, playful cereal grain. I could have drank it for days.

Dork Lard

Their website mentions “Three Lloyds” and so I was thinking this was some kind of playful Dark Lord clone. Turns out it’s just a medicinal mess of shit.

Then again, actually bothering to fully read the description, they call this a “light, syrupy giant,” so it’s my fault for ordering it. It gets much more palatable as it goes along, but it never really comes together. Medicinal ethanol up front, moving into wine-aged spices and light nodes of imitation vanilla and just a general flavor that’s like the way an old spice rack smells, when that decade-old shaker of nutmeg half made up of dust and mites.

Kudos to them for trying something weird and for being obliquely up front about that fact, instead of having the waitress call this a “strong ale” and tell me it was “like a double pils,” (which is how I think a shittier brewery would have attempted to classify this). Still, not very good.

Dude Do Tang

Smoked Brown Porter with orange zest, 5.9%

Decided to abandon the last half of my Dork Lard and get something else. Apparently they always have a smoke beer on tap, which is awesome, especially for those of us who are fancy enough to appreciate a nice digestif. Also, it is fucking excellent to see breweries playing up malt complexities.

Smoke nodes are pretty tame on this one, making it more of quaffable smokey beer than an intense, night-finishing rauchbier. The citrus nodes actually make this one very sessionable, which at first I found a little offputting but then I kept drinking and began to like it quite a bit. Sort of like squeezing an orange over a Hickory Farms gift package, only without having to consume gross pork flesh.

Received a gigantic box of Prairie last week, but I’ve been too busy with my serious drinking to bother with thoughtful drinking and so I haven’t had a chance to write about it. But now my work is done and I don’t got to be no where for 15 hours, so let’s open up one of these bastards.

Bomb is the most coveted Prairie, and so I’ll go with that first. It’s part of this new trend wherein high-ABV imperials are aged on peppers and chocolate, because chocolate covered peppers are just everyone’s favorite treat. It smells…like chocolate and peppers. But also crisp and manicured, like the fragrance of one of those brightly lit mall stores where they sell overpriced kitchen equipment. It’s clean, but a very specific, very dirty sort of clean.

Tastes like a new, perfect thing. I’ve had high-ABV chipotle stouts before, but this… this is different. The peppers dominate and are mellowed by the chocolate. So instead of getting a coffe-based RIS or a hoppy RIS or a vinous RIS, you get acidic, spicy peppers up front and smooth milky chocolate in the back. The former plays alongside the ethanol nodes, the latter buffets the barley. Also—what I realize after sipping it is that the cleanliness I detected in the aroma was the sharpness of the peppers interacting with the zippiness of the booze, which resulting in a dull-sharp peng of pleasant sterility akin to the rubbing alcohol swab doctors use before making injections.

1999: On a trip to the supermarket, an almost 16-year-old mynie tells his mom that he’s been a really good boy lately and he’d super appreciate it if she would buy him a six pack of something for his birthday. He will drink no more than one in a sitting and always under the supervision of his parents, because, hey, it’s good to develop healthy drinking habits early in life. She acquiesces, because this was years before the government started putting up those “If you buy liquor for minors you will burn in hell and your kids will become retards” billboards.

Rushing into the beer aisle, a literal kid in a near-literal candy store, our young hero was amazed by the influx of new malt products into the state, the result of a loosening of Iowa’s moronic liquor laws. There was beer with Hunter S. Thompson art on the label. Beer from Iowa. And, most strikingly, a vaguely communist-looking beer with an unappealing cartoon man drawn on the cover. Mynie stares at it for a while. His mom says it’s probably like Guinness or something, which she says tastes like worcestershire, and so he ends up with a sixer of Doc Otis.

2004: The “healthy drinking habits” bit was a ruse. Mynie would supplement the one he had around his family with frequent snorts off a magic marker, or chewing jimson weed, or playing the choking game, or doing really whatever the hell it took to get through his teenage years un-sober. By 2004, five years of near-constant illegal drug inebriation had passed. Ironically, turning the legal drinking age was about to settle down that terrifying Jon Bonham roller coaster of near-death intoxication into a nice, steady, Kathy Lee and Hoda pontoon boat ride of perpetual tipsiness.

A few weeks before turning 21, he starts reviewing beer online and is shocked to see that none of the beers he’s had—even good ones, like Heineken—are listed in the site’s top 100. A few weeks after turning 21, he exhausts his local gas station’s selection and is forced into the dark depths of the aisle across from the hard liquor.

And what was there? That weird commie beer he remembered from years before. The internet had verified that this particular brand was totally indie-tastic. (Believe it or not, several Rogues used to appear in BA’s top 100. Shakespeare stout was even in the top 40 or so—which it still should be.) And so he began reviewing Rogues and his mind was totally blown.

2005-2010: Rogue at first rules over everything. On his first trip to John’s Grocery, he spends the bulk of his Christmas-time gift certificates on buying up a bomber of every variety of theirs the store has in stock. There he finds the first beer he ever considers perfect. His first good American-style lager. His first imperial stout.

He drinks his first Belgian. Scores some Three Floyds. Starts going to beer fests and doing trades. But the Rogue is a mainstay. It’s one of the small handful of non-midwestern beers found on draft in Iowa. New shit keeps coming in—some good, some nearly literally shit—but Rogue is the most reliable American brewer.

Time passes and tastes change. An influx of shitty micros causes relatively high-priced Rogue to sit on the shelf for way, way too long, and you can only buy so many pricey stale bombers before you get gunshy. The price spikes further and further, always remaining ahead of the inflationary pace of other beers, which are quickly getting way too fucking expensive.

Mynie hears about Rogue’s “meh” business practices. They were founded by a guy who used to be an executive at Nike, and Nike is fucking evil. They also began the trend towards gentrifying the beer scene, even in spite of their emptily leftist ethos. Rogue becomes harder to find after his pertinently timed move to Indiana, which just so happened to coincide with a huge influx of new, good brewers into the area. Then there’s widespread backlash against the brand. They’re not making alpha bombs or sours, not barrel aging or limited releasing anything. Really, they’re far, far too available. They release a bacon doughnut beer, and troll the beer community by pretending to release a beer aged on pages torn from Moby Dick. People dismiss them as an expensive gimmick brewery, ignoring their massive importance upon the development and shape of the entire craft beer scene. And mynie basically goes along with it.

Today: Woke up this morning with a strange craving for Rogue. Any Rogue. Just—I needed to be around the bottle art for a little while, to remember the sense of measured happiness that drinking and reviewing 2 or 3 cheap, new beers used to give me. I wanted to remember my old apartment, which was warmly lit and overlooked a large cornfield where in the summer geese would gather and the sky was gigantic. Back then I had relatively little debt and my cats were young. I felt more of a sense of place in my wandering emptiness. I believed, as young people believe, that if I kept walking around that I would find some kind of fulfillment.

Remembering this time now, years later, in the way that men do when they’re feeling old but haven’t yet actually become old, I get stupid and sappy and begin regarding everything much too kindly. Things weren’t that great. They just seem precious, now, because that time is dead, because that spirit and feel will never, ever return no matter what happens or what I do.

I miss the security of knowing that Real Adulthood was still several years away. I miss the feeling of when simply existing was something to get excited about.

But do I miss Rogue? Yes. It was, and is, a strong token of that era. And, like the shitty comedies I loved so much in high school, I’ve been afraid to revisit it for fear that it would suck and its suckiness would ruin some perfectly nice memories. This Brown Ale is like Billy Madison. It’s maybe not in line with my current palette and if it came out now I wouldn’t take notice of it. But it did so much to shape my own palette, and was so inspired and unique in its own time, that it’s still excellent. (This contrasts to Flying Dog’s Road Dog, which resembles The Waterboy, meaning it has some small charm but is objectively not very good).

To address the haters: firstly, there is no need to continue referring to me as “The Ass Messer,” as I have begun a prescription regimen to address my leakage concerns. Secondly, this is a different beer than the Barrel Aged Johan I reviewed some time ago. Sun King just pours all their fancy reserve series beers into this same screw-top bottle, and then they put a cool sticker on it that tells you which one it is. See:

Okay, having addressed that, good lord this is an aggressive Flanders. This is one rare style where Americanization has typically equalled pussification. While we love loading up pale ales with raw alpha acid and have no problem soaking our stouts in spent turpentine barrels, for some reason we get all meek and timid when it comes to Flanders reds.

This was bold enough to remind me of the first time I tried Duchesse De Bourgogne: surprising acidic fruit, light twang of alcohol, OJ, melon, lemon, and harsh, sweet cherry. An aggressive, abrasive rush that’s like a cross between a really good beer and a really good salad dressing. A very pleasant punch to the face.